In recent years, distributed printing, a technology to distribute one or more print jobs to plural image forming apparatuses and print the one or more print job with the apparatuses together, is employed in offices and other facilities where plural image forming apparatuses are installed, in order to process a large printing load efficiently. This distributed printing includes processes to distribute one or more print jobs to plural image forming apparatuses and to process the one or more print jobs on the plural image forming apparatuses, and therefore needs appropriate job scheduling so as to realize efficient execution of the distributed printing.